So far AT&T has not disclosed pricing plans for its machine-to-machine (M2M) efforts, but to succeed it will have to offer a range that goes beyond its current offers of 5 GB for $60 or 200 MB for $40. Glenn Lurie, the executive in charge of M2M at AT&T, outlined to me back in June a variety of possible plans — from day passes to prepaid cards — that basically allow AT&T to charge a small fee each time someone sends a photo from their digital camera to another person using the 3G network. He also told me:

“If you had asked me five years ago if we would be doing this, you may have gotten a different answer,” Lurie said. “The goal of finding this incremental revenue is to make money. There is a lot of baggage around average revenue per user (ARPU), but these incremental revenues may bring in $1 per subscriber per month at 50 points of OIBDA [margin] on that dollar.”